Increasingly, cable operators are using video-on-demand (VOD) as a competitive advantage. Alternative video delivery methods such as movie download or video streaming via the Internet are also becoming more practical and feasible as service providers deploy either DOCSIS 3.0 wideband or fiber-to-the-home technologies.
Using the existing managed network approach that is adopted by various cable and telephone network operators, VOD content is typically encoded in MPEG-2 format and replicated/pushed along with metadata via a satellite or Internet Protocol (IP) backbone to local VOD systems. However, this approach does not necessarily scale well as the amount of available content increases. For instance, as the network grows and the amount of VOD content expands, it quickly becomes overly burdensome on the network to replicate all of the content out to local VOD systems.
In an alternative emerging “over-the-top” approach, the broadband Internet is typically used as the content distribution and streaming platform. In this approach, content aggregators and integrators license and publish movies and television shows via Internet websites. Client devices such as set-top boxes may be able to access media content via the Internet using a broadband pipe such as via a cable modem, DSL connection, or fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network. Content distribution within the Internet is often driven by a “pull” model in response to client device requests.
However, there are several limitations of this over-the-top approach. For instance, it may be difficult to achieve high concurrency for high-definition (HD) VOD streaming, and this approach relies on public Internet infrastructure that imposes quality of service constraints, which may result in substantial network congestion. Moreover, there is typically a lack of end-to-end network resource management, as well as inconsistent premium content offerings due to lack of programming agreements with content providers. In addition, a pure over-the-top approach typically requires subscribers to purchase a separate client device appliance for viewing VOD assets.
There are significant opportunities for network operators to expand the current VOD architecture in order to support larger VOD content libraries that provide an expansive amount of content, and to provide the VOD offerings to devices other than conventional set-top boxes, such as personal computers and portable media players. Such a new architecture may be capable of handling larger non-VOD content libraries as well.